On Tuesday, June 16th the Research Liberation Front announced 7 winners of this year’s Ginny Valentine Badge of Courage Awards for Bravery in Market Research at IIeX North America.

Unlike conventional market research awards, which typically celebrate marketing success or the rigour of a clever methodology, the Ginny Valentine Badge of Courage is awarded to those who fought long odds and showed exceptional determination to produce great market research. The awards are designed to recognize researchers wherever they work - within

On Tuesday, June 16th the Research Liberation Front announced 7 winners of this year’s Ginny Valentine Badge of Courage Awards for Bravery in Market Research at IIeX North America.

Unlike conventional market research awards, which typically celebrate marketing success or the rigour of a clever methodology, the Ginny Valentine Badge of Courage is awarded to those who fought long odds and showed exceptional determination to produce great market research. The awards are designed to recognize researchers wherever they work - within client companies or as suppliers. And in the four years since its inauguration, nominations have come from around the world from every part of the research industry.

Ginny Valentine, a UK based semiotician and researcher who died in 2010, had a distinguished career in which she challenged traditional market research and evangelized for the adoption of new thinking to improve the discipline.

Evoking her memory and example, this award recognizes researchers who stand out in an industry not often known for bravery, for their contributions developing new research approaches, setting up new ventures, persevering through controversial projects, pioneering new approaches in a client organization, or even facing physical danger in the course of their work.

On the process of selecting the winners, Fiona Blades, MESH Founder and CEO, member of the Research Liberation Front and founder of the awards in 2011, said “Yet again we have been inspired by researchers who have demonstrated whether in developed markets or developing countries that the best research relies on individuals who take risks and keep pushing standards forward whether it is running projects at huge personal risk or refusing to take no for an answer. We are very grateful for the time given by our distinguished panel of judges, three of whom were able to be with us today.”

The event took place on the second afternoon of the Insight Innovation Exchange North America 2015 conference in Atlanta run by Greenbook, who have lent their support of this initiative to promote bravery to the research industry in their international IIeX events and in their online publication. KL Communications supplied the crowd sourcing platform on which nominations were placed.

For further information:

The Research Liberation Front was founded by John Griffiths, Fiona Blades and other research revolutionaries in 2007 with the mission “To set research free.” www.researchliberationfront.com

"If marketers can draw a pie chart of where we spend our investment but not of how people pick up our brand experiences, we need to change our perspective." Using data-driven evidence from over a million experiences collected by MESH Experience over the past 10 years, we argue that using the Share of Experience (SOE) metric will be more helpful to marketers than using Share of Voice (SOV) to unlock brand growth. In a marketing era where Chief Marketing Officers find new roles as Chief Experience Officers, a matching set of metrics and models is essential.Taking an Experience-Driven Marketing approach will help marketers to grow their brands more effectively than using traditional tools. If marketers can draw a pie chart of where we spend our investment but not of how people pick up our brand experiences, we need to change our perspective. We urge the marketing community to measure Share of Experience in order to meet the evolving needs of an experience-based economy.

Share of voice (SOV) has always been an important metric for marketers to monitor. It helps us to understand how prominently we are promoting our brand versus competitors. But SOV only measures what we, as marketers, push out. It doesn’t measure what people actually pick up; and it only includes paid media, such as TV advertising and outdoor. It doesn’t cover earned, owned and environmental media. Is there a measure of brand pickup that gives a fuller picture? We have investigated a new metric – share of experience (SOE) – to see how this can help marketers. Share of experience is the percentage of total brand experiences that a brand has in relation to the total market. So if we are looking at airline brands, we might see that Delta Air Lines has 30% SOE, meaning that it has 30% of all experiences that people have with airlines.

Today’s marketers face the challenge of allocating resources to various touchpoints along the customer decision journey in order to optimize their spend while making the biggest impact on their potential customers. But aside from brand advertising, most of these touchpoints have only been understood in isolation. MESH recently teamed up with Cranfield University in order to understand touchpoints in the customer decision journey comparatively rather than individually, and the study yielded some surprising results.

Today’s marketers face the challenge of allocating resources to various touchpoints along the customer decision journey in order to optimize their spend while making the biggest impact on their potential customers. But aside from brand advertising, most of these touchpoints have only been understood in isolation. MESH recently teamed up with Cranfield University in order to understand touchpoints in the customer decision journey comparatively rather than individually, and the study yielded some surprising results.

Recently published in the Journal of Retailing, the study, titled “The Impact of Different Touchpoints on Brand Consideration,” utilized Real-time Experience Tracking (where by respondents live text their brand encounters) to understand the impact of six touchpoints across four industries (electrical goods, technology products, mobile handsets and soft drinks) on brand consideration. These touchpoints included brand advertising, retailer advertising, in-store communications, word-of-mouth, peer observation, and traditional earned media. The study looked at frequency of these touchpoints as well as positivity in order to help explain their impact on brand consideration.

While the results varied somewhat by industry, an overall look at the study revealed that in-store communication is the most influential touchpoint followed by peer observation and brand advertising, suggesting that marketers may want to consider spending more of their budgets on these touchpoints rather than on traditional earned media, which was the least influential touchpoint. Peer observation was also shown to be notably frequent in additional to being influential, which suggests that marketers could benefit from understanding this touchpoint in greater depth. The results of this study demonstrates how understanding the relative importance of touchpoints along the customer decision journey can help marketers to optimize their budgets and gain the most ROI. To read the full paper, please go to: http://authors.elsevier.com/a/1R0rM56V4hof7

Articles

MESH in Journal of Retailing: The Impact of Different Touchpoints on Brand Consideration

MESH recently paired up with Cranfield School of Business to put together a study on the impact of different touchpoints in the customer decision journey on brand consideration. The study revealed some surprising insights that could help brands to optimize their marketing ROI by better understanding their customer experiences with their brand.

This month, the Harvard Business Review have published an article about the effectiveness of MESH's Real-time Experience Tracking (RET)™, saying "a new tool radically improves marketing research".

The article, written by Emma K. Macdonald, Hugh N. Wilson, and Umut Konuş from Cranfield School of Management, describes the ways in which RET has been used to increase the effectiveness of marketing research for a number of clients, including SAS and Energizer. The article acknowledges that more conventional methods of research have to face a fundamental flaw: that of customer recall and the fact that customer’s memories can fade quite rapidly thus, causing inaccuracies. The article explains how the RET approach avoids this inaccuracy with the added benefit of taking away any unconscious bias (as can happen with ethnographic/shadow research, for example). It highlights how RET can reach ALL touchpoints together with brand positivity and persuasiveness, as feedback is given in real-time.

The Ginny Valentine Badge of Courage Awards are back and will be held at IIeX in Atlanta on June 16, 2015. The awards were launched in London in 2012 to recognize exceptional bravery in the market research industry, and to honor Ginny Valentine, a research revolutionary. Now in its 4th year, we are looking for new stories of bravery. These could come from any part of the market research

The Ginny Valentine Badge of Courage Awards are back and will be held at IIeX in Atlanta on June 16, 2015. The awards were launched in London in 2012 to recognize exceptional bravery in the market research industry, and to honor Ginny Valentine, a research revolutionary. Now in its 4th year, we are looking for new stories of bravery. These could come from any part of the market research industry, from any country, from someone of any age or gender. Variety is at the heart of these awards. Last year’s winners were selected for a wide range of brave acts including things like “Supporting Brave Creative Work,” “Courage in the Face of Adversity,” and “Disrupting the industry with the Development of Machine Learning for Analysis Research.”

There is a perception that market research is a conservative industry, but the stories that have already been collected demonstrate the contribution the people in our industry are making to society. Help us to unearth more awe-inspiring stories that make us proud of what we do. Nomination takes five to ten minutes by going to www.ginnyvalentineawards.com and the deadline for nominations is April 30th.

The Ginny Valentine Badge of Courage Awards will be held with the support of Greenbook, the Research Liberation Front, KL Communications and TNS.

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Sustainable Research - ESOMAR Congress September 2013

Sustainable Research has been developed by MESH and PepsiCo to deliver an approach to research that delivers significant benefits to both clients and participants.
This paper, presented by Fiona Blades at ESOMAR Congress Think Big Conference 2013 details the pilot in Brazil with this brave new approach. Click below to read more about how MESH is changing the face of Market Research.

With lots of customer interest and thriving locations in New York, London and São Paolo, MESH Experience was on something of a roll. As its President and CEO, Fiona Blades explains, the global firm had just been named 'Most Innovative Research Agency' by Acquisition International Magazine and was in the process of adding new offices in other parts of the world, including Singapore. However, one persistent problem was seriously threatening the bottom line.

MESH Experience is the subject of a new case study on Truphone's website. Head over to http://bit.ly/meshtruphone to read about how the the first mobile network built for global businesses helps us keep in touch with our clients and global team every day. By allowing our team members to have a single mobile device with multiple international numbers on a single SIM card, we eliminated the need for different phones and different international plans.

What does your brand sound like? Sound is a central part of people's experience with a product or service. It can fulfil the same role as a national anthem to a country or a hymn to a religion. And sound tends to transcend language and cultural barriers, which is one reason why the airline industry uses sound to welcome passengers at the beginning of their journey in a consistent and distinctive manner.

Next time you're boarding a plane, and trying to block out the sounds of the muzak, spare a

What does your brand sound like? Sound is a central part of people's experience with a product or service. It can fulfil the same role as a national anthem to a country or a hymn to a religion. And sound tends to transcend language and cultural barriers, which is one reason why the airline industry uses sound to welcome passengers at the beginning of their journey in a consistent and distinctive manner.

Next time you're boarding a plane, and trying to block out the sounds of the muzak, spare a thought for the cabin crew with their fixed smiles as they welcome another 5000 passengers that month.

Yet, research suggests that sound plays an important role in purchase decisions. Neuromarketing magazine reported a 1998 experiment in a British wine shop where they alternated piping in French and German music. On French music days, the French wine outsold German wine on a ratio of four to one. On German music days, German wine outsold the French by a ratio of three to one.

Similarly, Heston Blumenthal's Fat Duck restaurant in Bray has discovered that people's perception of the intensity of bitterness and sweetness present in a toffee was modified significantly by varying the pitch of a soundtrack that was playing over headphones.

Airlines pipe music into the aircraft as passengers board, welcoming them back, reassuring them with familiarity. The soundtrack may symbolise the airline's cultural heritage such as Pakistan International or Gulf Airlines or reflect a well-established brand cue already present in advertising such as British Airway's Flower Duet from Lakme or United Airlines' adoption of Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue. Delta Airlines rotates its music depending on the season. In December, it's a host of festive favourites from 'Jingle Bell Rock' to 'Baby, It's Cold Outside'.

Lufthansa developed a four-note sonic logo that is embedded into the airline's welcome 'anthem' Symphony of Angels. The sonic logo also precedes Lufthansa announcements in airports and welcomes callers who contact Lufthansa by phone.

When airline music strikes the right note, it's an important touchpoint alongside other brand experience - from the lounge to the in-flight experience, menu and cabin staff. And Singapore Airlines has taken the sensory experience of flying a step further, developing its own patented smell - in the flight attendants' perfume, blended in the hot towels before take-off and permeating the entire fleet of planes.

Sound plays an important part in triggering memory and feelings, and this impact on emotions can prime people for their next brand experience.

Articles

Real-time Campaign Tracking - Admap September 2013

When Wilkinson Sword launched their Hydro razor they needed to understand how the campaign performed as it rolled out. Using MESH's Real-time Experience Tracking (RET TM) Wilkinson Sword were able to understand how each touchpoint performed and optimize the campaign in real time, creating more market impact and making best use of budget. Click below to see how Real-time Experience Tracking (TM) is helping brands like Wilkinson Sword get more insight out of research.

MESH Experience (www.meshexperience.com) is proud to announce and welcome Julian Green as the Company’s Global Client Experience Director. He will initially focus on driving a new multi-brand proposition for MESH Experience, drawing on 10 years of captured consumer experiences and real-time experience collection.

Julian brings over 25 years of business knowledge in agency-based insight, marketing and advertising to MESH Experience. Most recently he was Managing Director at Millward Brown, Philippines after an interim assignment as MD for the UK’s Health, Beauty and travel business. He spent 12 years developing his own insight-based consultancy which was listed on London Stock Exchange AIM with a turnover of US$10 million. In the interim, Julian has directly advised clients in the financial, business and professional services industries.

Julian shares that “it’s a privilege to be joining such an innovative and ground-breaking organisation. I look forward to engaging with clients who value the predictive outcomes of Experience Driven Marketing and leading our input to our client stakeholders and the creative and media teams.”

Fiona Blades, President and Chief Experience Officer, MESH Experience, adds, “Julian joins us with a wealth of client, research, and commercial experience at a point where we are taking MESH to the next level in building our Experience Driven Marketing proposition for our clients. We have exciting plans ahead, and Julian will have a pivotal role in helping us to deliver them.”

About MESH Experience:

MESH was set up in 2006 to help clients make quicker and smarter decisions about their marketing investment. The full-service research consultancy, with offices in London, New York and Sao Paulo, does this through its Experience Driven Marketing approach and award-winning Real-time Experience Tracking methodology.